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 PROGRAMMING


  Readability in Programming Languages

I saw a side by side comparison of a bunch of scripting languages online recently. Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby My first, and second reaction was yuck! Now I have my biases – biases which may  not be shared by others of course. But I like readable code and for me anytime I see a special character (anything not an alphanumeric) it slows me down. This got me thinking about where we are going in design of programming languages? Are we moving forward (what ever that means) or backwards or just sideways?Back when I started programming close to 40 years ago the ...

2,005 0       PROGRAMMING STYLE CODING STYLE READABILI


  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players, etc. If we simply apply some simple game design principles, learning how to code can be much more ...

2,556 0       GAME DESIGN PROGRAMMING PATTERN DERIVATI


  Your Code is My Hell

It occurred to me recently that my experience as a Rails developer may be somewhat unique.I often get brought in to help preexisting Ruby/Rails projects evolve and mature in a sustainable way. As a result, the vast majority of Ruby projects I’ve worked on have been well-established by the time I arrived. In fact, offhand I can only think of one commercial greenfield Ruby project I’ve participated in. All the rest have been “legacy” from my perspective, in the sense that there was a sizable codebase in production before I showed up. (I’m not counting p...

3,304 0       CODE STYLE CLEAN CODE CODE PARADIGM


  Penrose Tiling in Obfuscated Python

Here’s a Python script which renders some Penrose tiling. Yes, this is valid Python code:_ =\ """if! 1:"e,V=100 0,(0j-1)**-.2; v,S=.5/ V.real, [(0,0,4 *e,4*e* V)];w=1 -v"def! E(T,A, B,C):P ,Q,R=B*w+ A*v,B*w+C *v,A*w+B*v;retur n[(1,Q,C,A),(1,P ,Q,B),(0,Q,P,A)]*T+[(0,C ,R,B),(1,R,C,A...

20,056 0       CODE STYLE WRITING PYTHON DISORDER


  Letter to a Young Developer

I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here are a few points off the top of my head:Work with other developers. We are at a wonderful time in the history of technology when for the first time, it doesn’t really matter where you are or who you are working for. So long as you have a decent internet connection, you can pair up with another developer anywhere in the world and work...

2,098 0       PROGRAMMER TIPS DEVELOPER LETTER OPPORTU


  Are frameworks making developers dumb?

Last week I got to take interviews to hire senior java developers with around 5 years of experience. But after the interview process is over I felt like the frameworks makes developers life easier but at the same time making them dumb.Everyone puts almost all the new frameworks on their resume claiming they have "Strong, working experience on Spring, Hibernate, Web Services etc".Here is how the interviews went on.Me: You have used Spring in your latest project. What are the advantages of using Spring?Interviewee: We can configure beans in XML and it will take care of instan...

2,898 0       FRAMEWORK IMPORTANCE DISADVANTAGE EASY


  Code Refurbishment

Within our industry we use a huge range of terminology.  Unfortunately we don’t all agree on what individual terms actually mean.  I so often hear people misuse the term “Refactoring” which has come to make the business in many organisations recoil in fear.  The reason for this fear I’ve observed is because of what people often mean when misusing this term.I feel we are holding back our industry by not being disciplined in our use of terminology.  If one chemist said to another chemist “we are about to perform titration”, both woul...

2,001 0       CODE REFURBISHMENT CODE DESIGN TERMINOLO


  Prototypes and Object Orientation

David Chisnall takes a look at the two dominant paradigms in object-oriented languages (classes and prototypes) and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each.Two terms are quite often confused when describing programming languages:class-based and object-oriented:Simula was the first class-based language. It provided classes (actually implemented using closures) as a means of encapsulating abstract data types.Smalltalk was the first object-oriented language. It provided a mechanism for decomposing programs into subprograms that ran on a simplified model of a computer an...

2,471 0       PROTOTYPE COMPARISON OOP DIFFERENTIAL MO